It really depends on the judge, but overall it's on you to show that the trademark has become public domain through use of that trademark by others. Usually it helps if the trademark holder was actually aware of that use, as well, but that's pretty hard to show.
Believe me, I know this has been happening for a while, I downloaded many skins for Quake and Q2 that used other characters as their basis that more than likely were not developed by the original creators (or IP holders) of those characters. Now, releasing a Spider-Man movie and using the other skinning sites that host Marvel characters as a basis for abandonment of trademark could be legally ok, but probably still wouldn't hold up in court unless you had better lawyers than Marvel. That's just an unfortunate part of reality.
It is there right, granted. I an not saying they do not have the right to do this. I just wish they wouldn't.
Unfortunately, it's not just their right, it's required of them if they wish to hold the trademarks. I don't believe the other portions they mentioned require them to stop people from doing so, but with trademarks you will lose them if you allow people to continue to use them. Once they lose the trademarks, they stand to lose a great deal of potential earnings, because there'd be no stopping everyone from making SpiderMan, X-Men, The Hulk, etc movies without paying Marvel for the use of those names and characters.
I've nothing against them, but they hardly reflect half of a geek's life.
Some of us wouldn't quite be (as much of?) geeks if it weren't for games. I know I certainly wouldn't have bought my first computer (or at least spent as much on it) if it weren't for games. I also wouldn't have become a software developer if it weren't for games.
And losses for the two consoles being sold at a loss are supposed to currently be over $50... so no, one game does not make up for selling a console at a loss. Normally, It is 6-8 games that is considered the point for breaking even
No one's stupid enough to sell at such a high loss that it takes 6-8 games to break even. Shortly after the XBox came out Microsoft made a very big deal about having the highest attach rate (# of games sold per console) for a console within the first X number of months (think it was 6 months, guess Ill have to look for the press release). The attach rate was 4. Going into a market where 4 games per console is a high (even highest ever) attach rate with a loss that requires 6-8 games to break even just isn't going to happen. Even the amount of money Microsoft expected to lose on the console didn't amount to needing an attach rate that was double their initial rate to break even.
While it takes large amounts of bandwidth to host a MMORG with a lot of clients I would be willing to bet it is significantly smaller than we all think.
Perhaps it is. I find many people that believe a given FPS game uses XXK/sec bandwidth on the client side (and the server side would normally be XX times the number of clients), but overall they are thinking it's about 3-4 times what a well-coded game will use. The sad part is that with most fps games the data is available in-game, if you know the console commands to display it.
These add up, but with cutting out the overhead of TCP I would think it is less bandwidth than we are thinking.
The biggest difference (between UDP and TCP) of course comes from the resending of packets, which is crucial for TCP, but not required for UDP. What most people don't realise, though, is that many games do resend packets via UDP when they're missed, although they severely limit the number of resends and are perfectly willing to drop the packet at that point.
They have to have even more bandwidth to handle the download of updates.
Part of which can be somewhat negated by the direct-download model if you patch the updates into the ISOs that new users download (and I have bought Game of the Year type releases for some games for this very reason). While the new users will probably be downloading slightly more than the users that downloaded before the patch was released, they will be downloading less in the long term (after the previous users have also downloaded the patch) because patches usually replace existing files to some extent.
This is extra bandwidth on top of what you normally have because you will have a portion of the world population downloading updates at differant times. The majority will get them the day of the update release, so maybe the increase isn't significant, but it is still additional bandwidth.
Anyone that's tried to download a Half-life patch the day it's released is probably aware of this;)
Now lets add in downloading ISO images for a game. Many of these new games are multiple CD games due to the massive size of the textures. The bandwidth required to provided downloads needs to be seperate in my opinion because it is going to be a large amount of bandwidth needed constantly. Because it will take each person downloading the game a long time to do so you can't rely on bandwidth for the game servers without damaging the playability of the game.
I agree with this, as even downloading small files over a game server's connection can severely impact the performance if it's done at anything more than the average client's data rate (usually ~5 kb/sec), which is a speed at which no one would want to download significant amounts of data, unless they were used to it (ie dial-up).
Also, because you have connections being taken up for very long periods of time you will need more bandwidth simply to handle a large number of connections. I seriously doubt that the amount of bandwidth these companies are currently getting could also handle dedicated downloads of game isos. Of course this is why I mentioned distributed downloads such as bit torrent, or even file shack or file planet could work. Anyway, just something to think about. Is bandwidth so cheap now that the extra bandwidth wouldn't cost as much if not more? I don't know, but I know that it still looks pretty darn expensive to me.
It's not so much that bandwidth is cheap, it's that buying a LOT of bandwidth becomes cheap. The more you buy, the less it costs per kb/sec (or whatever sub-division you want to make of the bandwidth). Not only that, but talk to major ISPs who are also infrastructure providers, see what kind of deals they're willing to make. If you can show that your servers should be able to handle far beyond your projected load, they may be willing to go in on an advertising deal to reduce the price of the bandwidth or provide it at no cost (unlikel
About perfect?!?!? That is really very funny. Maybe you bought Half-Life this weekend at Best Buy but Half-Life was FAR FAR from perfect. I managed to install it (yes the installer mostly worked.) then proceeded to D/L a 5MB patch. A week later the patch had swelled to 26 MB and is CURRENTLY 82 MB!! A game requiring an 82 MB patch is not "perfect"
That 82MB patch includes at least 3 mods (TFC, DMC, Ricochet?), and some updated models/content for the base game. It's not even close to 82MB of bug fixes.
The biggest problems with the initial release were: 1) The uninstaller, which whiped out the entire folder the game was installed to (default was Sierra\Half-life, it would whipe out the entire Sierra folder, even if other games were there, if you installed to C:\Half-Life and used the original uninstaller, you'd almost be just as well off if you had typed format c: in the command prompt). Very few people saw this bug, though, since they released a patch fairly quickly to address it (and iirc it was significantly smaller than 5 MB).
2) The networking code, which was mostly fixed within 2 months of release (that was the 5MB or 15 MB patch). Though they eventually completely replaced the networking code in a much later patch that also added DMC to the patch (TFC was sometime after the original networking fix, but long before the complete networking overhaul).
Basically, the 82MB patch gives you a completely different game if you're an online player, but has very little to do with bugs in the single-player game for which Half-life gets so much praise.
Basically, the size of the patch reflects how much Valve has added to the game, not how much work was required on the game. Most developers probably would've stopped support for Half-life around the 1.0.0.8 patch (the original release was 1.0.0.5, there was no public 1.0.0.7), which had given multiplayer capability on par with every other game out there, and left things like DMC, TFC, etc to the mod developers. Not to mention that a number of the later patches had to do with issues related to trying to stop people from using external cheats and internal exploits, mostly related to the mods, and most of which could've been fixed by external developers.
Also, each of the newer patches are released as a choice between two patches: 1) patch from any previous version, which basically includes everything to upgrade from a base install, but will patch any version released since then as well 2) patch from the previous version, which allows people that have kept up to date with their HL install to download what is almost always a significantly smaller patch.
bleh, whatever, I got a bit sick of the way Valve treated the multiplayer side of the game eventually, but overall I'd say they supported it a hell of a lot better than most other developers ever would, and that the initial product was nearly perfect, in that the single player worked very well for most people, and the multiplayer code only need 2 minor revisions to work well for most people (which is saying a lot since most multiplayer code can only hope to work well for most people).
Just a couple of quick notes because I don't have a whole lot to say on this whole thing, but had a couple of thoughts while reading this post:
Again cutting out the middle man is only a portion. Distribution costs are shifted under your model but may actually be increased due to shipping units to individuals rather than to wholesalers etc.
Many people that buy products online don't even consider the shipping costs until they're right in front of them, and by that point a large percentage of them have already dedicated themselves enough to buying the product that they only stop at excessive shipping costs. In other words, what I'm trying to say is, charge the customer for shipping if they choose that instead of downloading. It should still come in less than $50. I realize that part of what you're saying, though, is that they still have to pay for the bandwidth to allow downloads, too, but then they should already be paying for massive amounts of bandwidth to host their game in the first place.
While cutting out the middle man would certainly reduce costs you would have to do a serious analysis of how many projected sales you would lose because people wouldn't be able to walk into Wal Mart or Best Buy and pick up your game. How many game sales are not premeditated, but are initiated after the consumer picks up the shiny box and views the pretty picures on the back. Or sees the game being played on a floor demo unit. Again, those are questions that I certainly am not in a position to answer, but it is something else that fits into the equation.
I agree on this point, to some extent. However, I must note that I have played both UO and EQ, and not only didn't play either game for more than 2 months, but also didn't spend more than $20 on either game's initial purchase. I am glad I waited so long to buy those games so that I didn't waste $50 on them, but at the same time I often wonder if the whole MMO experience would have been better if I had gotten in on the game a bit earlier. These companies have never done any serious market analysis on how many sales they lose at $50 up front + $XX/month, either, except to determine how many subscribers they lose when XX = 15 vs. 12 vs. 9. Chances are that few, if any, of them every did serious analysis on the up-front price, because games like EQ have subscriber numbers that most of these games would kill for, anyway.
The sad part is that once people have invested significant time (and money) into their characters and the game, they're really far less likely to give up on it, and the companies are taking advantage of this, as you mentioned, by releasing minor expansions for full-blown expansion prices, and raising monthly fees.
I remember paying $70 for Phantasy Star IV, and $60 for any RPG on the SNES. $50 prices on games is not really that bad nowadays, considering inflation and all.
This rarely had anything to do with the cost of making the game itself, but rather with the cost of producing the cartridge for the game. You were basically paying to have a memory card embedded in that cartridge that could save your progress for you. Remember inputting codes in Metroid to get to the point you were at last in that game?
The standard cartridges for the NES had no saved game features, so the producers of RPGs either had to come up with complex code systems or add some memory and a battery to the cartridge internals. The entirety of that cost was passed to the consumer, of course, and is to be expected.
I even rented a cartridge for my Genesis from the cable company that plugged into the cable jack and let me download games that they offered for a subscription rate of something like $20/month, which was essentially cheaper than renting 4 games/month, and they offered 20 games with about 5 of them getting swapped out every couple of weeks or so, based on how much they got played.
You have a deeply skewed idea of what people can afford.
You're probably right. I grew up in a middle class family and my parents are probably now considered upper-middle class, despite the fact that their disposable income has only grown in relation to the number of kids that have moved out of their house (3 out of 5 unless someone moved back in since I last visited on XMas). I also happen to be considered middle-class myself based on my income, despite the fact that my disposable income is very low, and the area I live in is decidedly below middle class. Of course, since 'low-income' rent in most of the places I've lived generally runs in the $500-800/month area, I guess life just sucks in general (and the idea that someone can qualify to live in low-income housing and pay those rates is frightening).
$130-350 represents the entire monthly disposable income of more than half the families in the US. The "middle class" is a shrinking minority. I assure you, the number of mini-disk players in the backpacks of students in a given highschool varies in direct proportion to where that highschool is.
The highschool I went to was decidedly upper-middle and middle class. The number of pagers and cell phones in backpacks of students was definitely much higher than would have been considered normal in the mid-90's. My youngest step-brother graduated from the same school much more recently and I can't say that he or any of his friends had any more interest in minidisc than anyone else I know, yet most of them (and myself) have portable MP3 players of some sort (I personally have a CD/MP3 player that was amongst the first available, and therefore mostly sucks). The only people I've seen consider minidisc are, as I said before, those looking for something pretty much skip-proof for their cars (which is far more important when you're running rediculous suspension systems on the cars themselves which make even the best CD players skip).
The idea that people are spending money on minidisc players rather than RAM or hard drive based MP3 players seems a bit rediculous to me, especially amongst the middle and upper-middle class. Personally, if I were in a lower income bracket, I think I'd go with cassette, instead, which is what I still use in my car due to the cost of getting a decent CD player for it.
Sony Pictures showed operating income of $492million on sales of $6billion. Sony Music showed an operating loss of $73million on sales of $5billion. Sony Videogames showed an operating income of $942million on sales of $8billion. Sony Electronics showed an operating income of $345million on sales of $41billion.
Sony is doing everything they can to stop IP piracy to protect their movie and entertainment divisions, because that's the best way they have to make money. They have to work a *lot* harder in their electronics division (8 times the sales) to make 2/3 the operating income of the movie division. 5 times more sales in electronics than in videogames, and they made 1/3 the income.
They made nearly twice the income on video games as they did on movies, with movies having 3/4 as much in sales. They lost money in music with more than half as much in sales. As an added bonus, CDs and DVDs are nearly the same in price now, while video games cost 2-3 times as much, whether for a playstation or a PC, and go to 'bargain bin' prices at the same price point as CDs and DVDs.
In other words, they're selling more DVDs than they are video games and making less money because *gasp* no one in their right minds would pay $50 for a movie. At the same time, if you charge half as much for video games (across the board), and for some strange reason sales stay the same (which just wouldn't happen, sales should increase significantly at half price), video games would be at a $3 billion loss.
Chances are that the only reason Sony Pictures shows any kind of profit is because most of the cost of movie production is made up in the theaters, and the blockbusters produce enough to cover the failures (and they produce fewer movies than they do video games or CDs, for the most part, plus their video game profits include profits from games they put out absolutely no money to produce). DVD sales only make money because the cost to produce a DVD is next to nothing, and the movie's production costs are already covered (if they're not, the loss will be written off before the DVD is released, although it will still be counted when it comes to what everyone makes on that movie).
With CDs, they're producing too much crap if they lose 73 million on 5 billion in sales. There's absolutely no way Sony should be spending 5 billion in music production this year if they lost money on 5 billion in sales last year, but I'm guessing that their operating budget was either increased or only decreased by about 100 million (which seems like a lot of money, but if they had 5 billion in sales and lost 73 million, that means they supposedly spent that much more than they brought in). They need to make sure they're getting a significant return on their top artists (ie not spending more in promotions of these artists than they're making), and limit their spending on less known artists. By this, I don't mean they shouldn't sign new artists that no one's heard of, I simply mean that they shouldn't blow $1 million on an album that they should be able to put together in a smaller studio for half that. Sony Music could also cut some of the fat by reducing the number of labels they operate, and still keep the same artists. The only reason so many labels can handle the artists any better than one label could is simply because the people running the labels have no clue how to be flexible about the needs of different types of artists. You don't need a completely new label to address those needs, just a true A&R department that does what those departments were started for in the first place.
Sales don't matter. Income and profits matter
Sales matter a great deal, you get neither income nor profits without sales. Expenditures matter, as well. How much of Sony's efforts against piracy have been taken out of Sony Pictures' profits? How much was taken out of Sony Music? Did Sony Corp. decide to put the overhead all on Sony Music, despite the fact that anti-piracy efforts should really be split between Mu
It's possible that the relatively low incomes that the working and middle classes in USA have, have lead to Minidisc players being too expensive for most people and their kids.
Portable MD players run $130-350. Portable CD/MP3 players from Sony run $90-150. None of these are what seems to be outside the reach of the middle class in the US.
Minidisc never really took off in the US because it had a poor selection of titles at launch and the hardware to record to Minidisc was too expensive initially. Plus, the format came out too soon after adoption of CDs spread. It's had a recent surge from some people looking for alternatives to CDs in car stereos, though.
No one is looking for pre-recorded minidiscs any more, though, which is a good thing since no one carries them anyway.
Region encoding is just bs, and the manufacturers of consoles would have less to complain about in terms of piracy rates if their consoles were region free. Fewer people (though admittedly probably not quite as few as some would like to believe) would be modding their consoles if they could import games and have them just work. Even the GameCube allows region switching without modding it, although it's not as simple as just putting in a game from another region, like the GBA. Unfortunately, the US is still big on region encoding, and it's still pretty hard to find a DVD player that comes region free out of the box, though it's not hard to find little 'easter eggs' that unlock region free operation for most of the current models if you look around on the internet.
Well duh. The bank technically is only giving you an "advance" on that home loan you applied for too. Of course you still have to pay it back. The point is that if you could come up with the money to buy a house yourself you wouldn't have needed their help. Likewise, these artists need money to get nationwide exposure and they're willing to take the label's advances in the hopes that it will launch their career to the point where they're making their own living off it. Repeat after me: the labels are not just going to "give" artists money, they will LOAN it to them.
The post I replied to implied that the labels foot the bills on that. The only time a label foots a bill on anything is if they can't sell your albums, and you'd better bet they don't let you out of their contract even if the fact they can't sell your albums is simply because they didn't promote or even make enough copies of your album. Other than that, if I take a loan out to buy a house, at least I own the house when I'm done with it. If I take a loan from a record label they get to own however many albums I sign for, plus full repayment of every dollar they spend plus interest. I get royalties, which may or may not actually come to me depending on how good my lawyer is (never mind that most artists end up with label-appointed lawyers because they don't realise they need one before it's too late).
Didn't or couldn't? If CC doesn't want to play them, how is the label supposed to "make" them do it?
How did Michael Jackson's videos get on MTV when they refused to play the videos of any black artist in the early/mid 80s? Oh yeah, the label put pressure on MTV by threatening to revoke all of their artists. Pearl Jam may not have been as successful as Michael Jackson with their first two albums, but then Michael Jackson was not as successful as he was without MTV, either.
Yeah, and I imagine these fights are over "I'm not getting AS many millions as I want." Aerosmith, Kiss, Metallica, Eminem, NSync, etc. are millionaires many times over (and I doubt they would have found themselves in that position without the help of a record label, ahem). Forgive me for not caring if they "only" get a few percent of the album sales when those albums are merely ADS for more lucrative ventures. The label takes the risk for fronting money on an album, they deserve to reap the rewards. The artists will either hit it big or return to being unemployed singers. They can only do good signing with a label.
Metallica only got signed because they had already built up a name for themselves, and released 2 albums with a small label. Those 2 albums were included in the number of albums they had to release with the label under their first major label contract, and they retained all of the rights to their music. The biggest 'fight' they ever had with their label was releasing a 3-CD boxed set to fulfill the contract so they could renegotiate after releasing the best selling album they've ever recorded. They weren't exactly worried about money, but they knew they had what it took to get a favourable deal. Who really cares now? They're not even close to the types of problems I was discussing. Try looking for people that filed for bankruptcy after selling millions of records. Some of them were just stupid with their money, but others never made the money in the first place.
As for the albums being ads for more lucrative ventures, that's only the case if you see the industry the way it sees itself. Kiss looked at it that way, Metallica does not. Most bands don't go into music looking to sell T-shirts.
Okay, you're still missing the point. Let's say you're a "talented artist" who's put up a website selling songs at a "Slashdotter-approved" price of two cents per song. How am I going to find your music? I don't hear you on the radio, I don't see you on TV, I don't see articles about you in the newspaper, etc. You have no exposure. Chances are you're still going to be making less money than you would with a major l
You've never used the WaveBird. All problems gone.
OK, I've accepted that the WaveBird may be a good controller. Here's my problem with hearing this repeated over and over again:
WTF good does that do the rest of us that don't currently have a GameCube?
I will most likely pick up a WaveBird with my GC, fine, but as even a few of the people raving about the WaveBird have admitted, that doesn't mean that all wireless controllers are good, or even all current wireless controllers.
Why do you think it's an artist's dream to get a major label deal?
In some cases it is, but in most cases the artist's dream is simply to make a living creating and performing their art. There are many cases where artists have gained a name on independent labels and then had the clout to get major label contracts that worked for them, instead of making them work for the label. In a few cases, those artists were even able to leave the major labels with their work when the labels refused to release and support their work as they intended it to be heard.
Because the label will pay for promotion, advertising, product positioning, radio time, etc.
The label only pays advances for these things. Every bit of it gets charged to the artist, regardless of whether or not the artist approved the methods used (ie paying for radio time, which is illegal if done directly, some artists have had enough clout to force the label to pay for this directly, but it's very rare, and the labels do get billed for every song played every time it's played anyway). Labels will not promote or position artists that they don't want to promote. Regardless of Pearl Jam's musical direction, for instance, they were still getting airplay until they spoke out against Ticketmaster and Clear Channel. Once they did that, Clear Channel shut down their radio play, and the label didn't do anything about it.
These are all things which help you SELL MORE UNITS. If you sell millions, YOU WILL GET PAID. Just ask any artist who has sold millions of records... they'll tell you two things: 1, that they're happy they signed with a major label; 2, that they couldn't have accomplished it by themselves.
For #1: see any number of current and past artists who have had fights with the labels over the amount of money they've made off their multi-platinum albums. Look at the whole thing with Prince (though I'm sure most people could care less about him these days, he was doing very well before he started his fight with Sony), or even the more recent battles with some of the current top-selling acts.
As for #2, the main reason they can't accomplish it by themselves is because of the industry. Radio airplay only goes to the songs that the labels will pay for. Clear Channel (and the one or two other radio promoters in the US) will not put up with stations playing music for which they can't bill a label. Most retail chains won't carry independent music, and few will even carry small labels (and WalMart, the biggest music retailer in the country, has many more rules regarding what they will and will not carry). Viacom owns the majority of all video airplay on television in the US (Viacom owns MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, etc; ever wonder why Nick. started the 'Kids choice awards' and other music promotionals?).
Digital music and video are means by which video and audio recording, production, and distribution can be made easily affordable and accessable to every single person that wants to pursue a career. The labels want to do whatever they can to hold on to their position as the only route through which to gain access to these things, before it becomes easy for my next door neighbor to figure out how to make it without them.
This removes one of the two main reasons people hated it. They're hoping to overcome the other with marketing, I'm sure.
I think you forgot the whole 'throwing plastic discs into the landfills at an alarming rate' part that pissed so many people off.
Also, the simple reality is that some DVD players aren't going to play self-destructing discs. There've been 3 revisions to the DVD standard and there are already problems with old DVD players not being able to play some discs that have no deviation from the standard (just that they hit the 3rd revision standard rather than the original standard).
As an added bonus, the number of DVD and CD players (set-top/stereo component boxes) that are using computer-style CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives has been increasing over the last couple of years (especially the case with DVD players where MP3, MPEG, and other formats are often supported), and in many cases these discs are being made not to run in those types of drives.
As for the DVD Audio format, whether or not it's supported by your DVD player simply depends on what DVD player you own. The older it is, the more likely it is that it's not supported. In those cases where it's not supported you're just as well off buying a player for the new CD format as for the DVD Audio format, and at least the CD format is playable in the majority of CD and DVD players, and the CD-quality tracks on the disc can be ripped to MP3.
I think more people will want to use it to play dvd's than going online or for multiple tv's or want wireless controllers.
I agree with the multiple tvs and wireless controllers parts, but not the going online part. While none of my consoles are currently online (though I'm considering getting a wireless router to hook them all up), I believe that charging extra for an ethernet port (especially at the rates charged for the Sega and Sony adapters, and considering how hard they can be to find) is pretty much insane, especially since it costs next to nothing to add to a system if it's built into the board (consider that you can buy a PCI 10/100 ethernet card for $5, and that ethernet ports are standard on most x86 motherboards now). Cable internet has a very high market penetration in the US, and those that don't have access to it will eventually if they have access to cable television. The more systems that have this built in, instead of as an add-on, the more likely it is that developers will support it. While I believe that online only titles may never take off on consoles, or maybe will simply take a few more years, online multiplayer and online extras will become nearly as crucial in the success of console games as in the success of PC games.
I have my own dvd player and won't ever use a console to play dvd's, but the added cost of being able to play dvd's can't be anything since games already will use that ability to some extent. Its already there so why force someone to buy a remote to access it when it can just as easily be controlled from the controller. If they want something better then buy the remote.
I agree more or less. There could be a few more things that are needed to support DVD playback that aren't needed to play games, but most of that functionality is a very small cost when it's built into the video chipset (as it is with most current video chipsets, both in PCs and consoles). The added cost of the remote is the only reason I've never used my XBox for DVD playback, although I've heard that it does better than the PS2 (I wouldn't use either of them, but my roommate highjacked the DVD player in the living room and I don't care enough to force the issue when I have a DVD player in my room and the PS2 plays DVDs). Still, with the proliferation of DVD players, I'd think the only valid reason for using a game system as a DVD player for most people is when the system is hooked up to a secondary TV in the household. I can certainly pick up a DVD player that does a better job than the PS2 for $10 more than the cost of a PS2 game down at the local WalMart (although quite frankly I doubt that DVD player would be as good as either of the DVD players I already own).
Top loading is the best and probably is the best use of space since the top door doesn't need to be very thick or take up much plastic. But with a drawer you have that entire drawer mechanism that you have to build around. Make it look like the rest of my home theater stuff. Right now I have a separate shelf for the game systems because they don't go with anything else that I have and don't fit nicely on the shelves because of their odd sizes and shapes.
Wouldn't a top-loading system continue to cause problems with this for you? At best your console would have to be on top of the stack or on it's own shelf with easy access to the top of the unit. Overall, the current XBox and PS2 don't stand out too much from the rest of the equipment I have, but then the only stuff I have that seems to be a consistent size is rackmount equipment. My Dreamcast, on the other hand, stays out of site when I'm not actively playing it.
If you are going to support dvd playing, make it a progressive dvd player and make it work out of the box. No more nickle and dimeing the customer to buy a remote in order to play dvd's.
So, don't make customers pay for things some don't want/use/need, but make sure the DVD player's a good one and doesn't require anything else to play DVDs... Personally, I don't play DVDs on my XBox because I'm not going to spend $30 to do it, but I wouldn't ask them to build the functionality into it, either. Then again, I don't see why they couldn't control it with the controllers like the PS2 does (even though using the controllers to play DVDs on the PS2 is a pain in the ass).
I've been told it's pretty good by the other posters in this thread, so I may try it out when I actually get a Gamecube, again as I said in other parts of this thread.
I bet you any amount of money you won't see any kind of latency in a double blind test.
Except, of course, that actually doing a double-blind test is impossible without mocking up a wire on the wireless controller... Or, I could do it blindfolded, in which case I wouldn't know if there was any latency anyway. Then again, considering the games I intend to get for the GC, it may not matter either way.
Also remember the PSOne was released at a low price around the time the Dreamcast came out. So, it could be that near the end of life of one console, if a new console comes out from one of the other 3 (doesn't Nintendo intend to be much faster to the table this time around?), you could see a new revision of the other 2 consoles and a large price drop to combat the adoption of the new console (PS2 came out in the US what, a year after the Dreamcast? Or was that just when you could finally get them without being on a waiting list?). I distinctly remember a lot of parents going out at XMas time looking for 'Playstations' that may have inadvertently brought home PSOne systems for kids that already had a PS 1 and wanted a PS2, because the PS2s were released, but weren't available for the most part.
My parents didn't buy an NES until it dropped to $110 w/ the light gun + duck hunt/SMB cartridge, whereas my uncle had bought one with the robot years earlier for ~$400. The improvement in the graphics of NES games over the years was really amazing when you look back, too.
Also, please don't compare phones with controllers, it is very painful
It's fundamentally the same technology, whether it's painful or not. The only real difference is that the phones usually need more throughput and less interference to be tolerable.
The way I see it, though, is that if people seem to think that a particular controller is much more functional than others have been, then it's not a big deal to go out and grab one when I'm already throwing down some cash for a console, memory card, and other assorted things (gba link cable, maybe another game besides what comes with the console), and would be buying a second controller anyway. Worst case scenario is that it doesn't work well for me, and it gets relegated to the 2nd controller port, much like the XBox S Controller that came with that system.
I would highly recommend both items, although cost might be an issue. If memory serves, the WaveBird was about $35 new, and the Logitech MX700 is around $75 - 80.
I'll probably pick up a WaveBird with my GC in a couple weeks. If it gives me any problems it can always be controller 2;p As for the Logitech mouse, I won't touch anything they make until they make a trackball I can use comfortably. I'm setting up a computer for my gf, though, and she might prefer a mouse, so we shall see. I was considering wireless on that one, anyway, because it was originally going to be used as a media server in my apartment (connected to the TV & stereo, store all of my MP3 files and video files on it), and she only uses the computer for Word/IE for the most part anyway.
I don't know who the hell ever thought that 6' was enough to go from somewhere near the TV to wherever the kids would be sitting, but they need beaten in the head with something heavy.
It was perfectly fine when I was a kid playing NES and had absolutely no problem sitting on the floor 2 feet from the TV for hours on end. Now I start to get back and circulation problems if I'm not in a comfortable chair, though, and I like to have a place to set a drink, and maybe a strategy guide or some notes depending on the game. Not to mention taking breaks every hour or so to make sure I don't strain my eyes and hands, and to feed my tobacco addiction.
I'd recommend 5ghz. It's got additional bandwidth, and not nearly as many things operating in the same range. Latency shouldn't be an issue, as long as it's tested properly..
5 GHz products are required to meet, at least in the US, 'listen before transmit' specifications. In other words, before transmitting anything (and every time they transmit), they must make sure the frequency over which they're transmitting is clear. The reason is because the frequency range is used by the DoD and military. Since I live in an area surrounded by military bases (Hampton Roads area of Virginia), it's likely that in times of heightened alert a 5GHz device could be either non-functional or high-latency.
I suggest you give it a try, having wireless controller has cleared all the clutter from my living room. You are actually the first person I have ever heard making complaints about latency. Have you even tried out a modern 2.4GHz wireless controller?
Well, I can always pick up a Wavebird when I pick up my GC, and if it works out I'll look around at the controllers for the other systems (unfortunately I somehow doubt there's a recent wireless Dreamcast controller out there). I'm a little worried by the fact that you've never heard any complaints about latency, though, since that would generally imply that either you (and the people you know) don't notice the latency, or just don't play games where it matters (or compensate, which can be done in some games). As for a 2.4 GHz controller, I'm pretty sure both the PS2 controller I tried and the GC controllers my friends have are 2.4GHz, but that doesn't really mean anything, since that's simply the frequency they transmit at, and has little to do with transmission latency. I do know that my parents' 2.4GHz phones sound like crap, but that's really not the same issue, either (has a lot to do with them having transmission towers nearby, which I don't think is an issue where I live, but could be).
I prefer street races to the oval tracks, but I still don't want to watch a bunch of F1/CART style cars any more than I want to watch a bunch of cars turn around an oval all day.
Slashdot Mirror
How much effort is needed to hold a trademark?
It really depends on the judge, but overall it's on you to show that the trademark has become public domain through use of that trademark by others. Usually it helps if the trademark holder was actually aware of that use, as well, but that's pretty hard to show.
Believe me, I know this has been happening for a while, I downloaded many skins for Quake and Q2 that used other characters as their basis that more than likely were not developed by the original creators (or IP holders) of those characters. Now, releasing a Spider-Man movie and using the other skinning sites that host Marvel characters as a basis for abandonment of trademark could be legally ok, but probably still wouldn't hold up in court unless you had better lawyers than Marvel. That's just an unfortunate part of reality.
It is there right, granted. I an not saying they do not have the right to do this. I just wish they wouldn't.
Unfortunately, it's not just their right, it's required of them if they wish to hold the trademarks. I don't believe the other portions they mentioned require them to stop people from doing so, but with trademarks you will lose them if you allow people to continue to use them. Once they lose the trademarks, they stand to lose a great deal of potential earnings, because there'd be no stopping everyone from making SpiderMan, X-Men, The Hulk, etc movies without paying Marvel for the use of those names and characters.
I've nothing against them, but they hardly reflect half of a geek's life.
Some of us wouldn't quite be (as much of?) geeks if it weren't for games. I know I certainly wouldn't have bought my first computer (or at least spent as much on it) if it weren't for games. I also wouldn't have become a software developer if it weren't for games.
And losses for the two consoles being sold at a loss are supposed to currently be over $50... so no, one game does not make up for selling a console at a loss. Normally, It is 6-8 games that is considered the point for breaking even
No one's stupid enough to sell at such a high loss that it takes 6-8 games to break even. Shortly after the XBox came out Microsoft made a very big deal about having the highest attach rate (# of games sold per console) for a console within the first X number of months (think it was 6 months, guess Ill have to look for the press release). The attach rate was 4. Going into a market where 4 games per console is a high (even highest ever) attach rate with a loss that requires 6-8 games to break even just isn't going to happen. Even the amount of money Microsoft expected to lose on the console didn't amount to needing an attach rate that was double their initial rate to break even.
1) Is Jar-Jar's race in this game?
;p
2) Is xenocide allowed?
If so, $50 + $14.95/mo is a bargain!
Alternatively:
if (1 && 2 == true){bargain;}
if (1 == true && 2 == false) { $14.95 + $0/month > bargain;}
if (1 == false && 2 == true) {WeShallSee();}
and yes, I know there's a more efficient way to code that
While it takes large amounts of bandwidth to host a MMORG with a lot of clients I would be willing to bet it is significantly smaller than we all think.
;)
Perhaps it is. I find many people that believe a given FPS game uses XXK/sec bandwidth on the client side (and the server side would normally be XX times the number of clients), but overall they are thinking it's about 3-4 times what a well-coded game will use. The sad part is that with most fps games the data is available in-game, if you know the console commands to display it.
These add up, but with cutting out the overhead of TCP I would think it is less bandwidth than we are thinking.
The biggest difference (between UDP and TCP) of course comes from the resending of packets, which is crucial for TCP, but not required for UDP. What most people don't realise, though, is that many games do resend packets via UDP when they're missed, although they severely limit the number of resends and are perfectly willing to drop the packet at that point.
They have to have even more bandwidth to handle the download of updates.
Part of which can be somewhat negated by the direct-download model if you patch the updates into the ISOs that new users download (and I have bought Game of the Year type releases for some games for this very reason). While the new users will probably be downloading slightly more than the users that downloaded before the patch was released, they will be downloading less in the long term (after the previous users have also downloaded the patch) because patches usually replace existing files to some extent.
This is extra bandwidth on top of what you normally have because you will have a portion of the world population downloading updates at differant times. The majority will get them the day of the update release, so maybe the increase isn't significant, but it is still additional bandwidth.
Anyone that's tried to download a Half-life patch the day it's released is probably aware of this
Now lets add in downloading ISO images for a game. Many of these new games are multiple CD games due to the massive size of the textures. The bandwidth required to provided downloads needs to be seperate in my opinion because it is going to be a large amount of bandwidth needed constantly. Because it will take each person downloading the game a long time to do so you can't rely on bandwidth for the game servers without damaging the playability of the game.
I agree with this, as even downloading small files over a game server's connection can severely impact the performance if it's done at anything more than the average client's data rate (usually ~5 kb/sec), which is a speed at which no one would want to download significant amounts of data, unless they were used to it (ie dial-up).
Also, because you have connections being taken up for very long periods of time you will need more bandwidth simply to handle a large number of connections. I seriously doubt that the amount of bandwidth these companies are currently getting could also handle dedicated downloads of game isos. Of course this is why I mentioned distributed downloads such as bit torrent, or even file shack or file planet could work. Anyway, just something to think about. Is bandwidth so cheap now that the extra bandwidth wouldn't cost as much if not more? I don't know, but I know that it still looks pretty darn expensive to me.
It's not so much that bandwidth is cheap, it's that buying a LOT of bandwidth becomes cheap. The more you buy, the less it costs per kb/sec (or whatever sub-division you want to make of the bandwidth). Not only that, but talk to major ISPs who are also infrastructure providers, see what kind of deals they're willing to make. If you can show that your servers should be able to handle far beyond your projected load, they may be willing to go in on an advertising deal to reduce the price of the bandwidth or provide it at no cost (unlikel
About perfect?!?!? That is really very funny. Maybe you bought Half-Life this weekend at Best Buy but Half-Life was FAR FAR from perfect. I managed to install it (yes the installer mostly worked.) then proceeded to D/L a 5MB patch. A week later the patch had swelled to 26 MB and is CURRENTLY 82 MB!! A game requiring an 82 MB patch is not "perfect"
That 82MB patch includes at least 3 mods (TFC, DMC, Ricochet?), and some updated models/content for the base game. It's not even close to 82MB of bug fixes.
The biggest problems with the initial release were:
1) The uninstaller, which whiped out the entire folder the game was installed to (default was Sierra\Half-life, it would whipe out the entire Sierra folder, even if other games were there, if you installed to C:\Half-Life and used the original uninstaller, you'd almost be just as well off if you had typed format c: in the command prompt). Very few people saw this bug, though, since they released a patch fairly quickly to address it (and iirc it was significantly smaller than 5 MB).
2) The networking code, which was mostly fixed within 2 months of release (that was the 5MB or 15 MB patch). Though they eventually completely replaced the networking code in a much later patch that also added DMC to the patch (TFC was sometime after the original networking fix, but long before the complete networking overhaul).
Basically, the 82MB patch gives you a completely different game if you're an online player, but has very little to do with bugs in the single-player game for which Half-life gets so much praise.
Basically, the size of the patch reflects how much Valve has added to the game, not how much work was required on the game. Most developers probably would've stopped support for Half-life around the 1.0.0.8 patch (the original release was 1.0.0.5, there was no public 1.0.0.7), which had given multiplayer capability on par with every other game out there, and left things like DMC, TFC, etc to the mod developers. Not to mention that a number of the later patches had to do with issues related to trying to stop people from using external cheats and internal exploits, mostly related to the mods, and most of which could've been fixed by external developers.
Also, each of the newer patches are released as a choice between two patches:
1) patch from any previous version, which basically includes everything to upgrade from a base install, but will patch any version released since then as well
2) patch from the previous version, which allows people that have kept up to date with their HL install to download what is almost always a significantly smaller patch.
bleh, whatever, I got a bit sick of the way Valve treated the multiplayer side of the game eventually, but overall I'd say they supported it a hell of a lot better than most other developers ever would, and that the initial product was nearly perfect, in that the single player worked very well for most people, and the multiplayer code only need 2 minor revisions to work well for most people (which is saying a lot since most multiplayer code can only hope to work well for most people).
Just a couple of quick notes because I don't have a whole lot to say on this whole thing, but had a couple of thoughts while reading this post:
Again cutting out the middle man is only a portion. Distribution costs are shifted under your model but may actually be increased due to shipping units to individuals rather than to wholesalers etc.
Many people that buy products online don't even consider the shipping costs until they're right in front of them, and by that point a large percentage of them have already dedicated themselves enough to buying the product that they only stop at excessive shipping costs. In other words, what I'm trying to say is, charge the customer for shipping if they choose that instead of downloading. It should still come in less than $50. I realize that part of what you're saying, though, is that they still have to pay for the bandwidth to allow downloads, too, but then they should already be paying for massive amounts of bandwidth to host their game in the first place.
While cutting out the middle man would certainly reduce costs you would have to do a serious analysis of how many projected sales you would lose because people wouldn't be able to walk into Wal Mart or Best Buy and pick up your game. How many game sales are not premeditated, but are initiated after the consumer picks up the shiny box and views the pretty picures on the back. Or sees the game being played on a floor demo unit. Again, those are questions that I certainly am not in a position to answer, but it is something else that fits into the equation.
I agree on this point, to some extent. However, I must note that I have played both UO and EQ, and not only didn't play either game for more than 2 months, but also didn't spend more than $20 on either game's initial purchase. I am glad I waited so long to buy those games so that I didn't waste $50 on them, but at the same time I often wonder if the whole MMO experience would have been better if I had gotten in on the game a bit earlier. These companies have never done any serious market analysis on how many sales they lose at $50 up front + $XX/month, either, except to determine how many subscribers they lose when XX = 15 vs. 12 vs. 9. Chances are that few, if any, of them every did serious analysis on the up-front price, because games like EQ have subscriber numbers that most of these games would kill for, anyway.
The sad part is that once people have invested significant time (and money) into their characters and the game, they're really far less likely to give up on it, and the companies are taking advantage of this, as you mentioned, by releasing minor expansions for full-blown expansion prices, and raising monthly fees.
I remember paying $70 for Phantasy Star IV, and $60 for any RPG on the SNES. $50 prices on games is not really that bad nowadays, considering inflation and all.
This rarely had anything to do with the cost of making the game itself, but rather with the cost of producing the cartridge for the game. You were basically paying to have a memory card embedded in that cartridge that could save your progress for you. Remember inputting codes in Metroid to get to the point you were at last in that game?
The standard cartridges for the NES had no saved game features, so the producers of RPGs either had to come up with complex code systems or add some memory and a battery to the cartridge internals. The entirety of that cost was passed to the consumer, of course, and is to be expected.
I even rented a cartridge for my Genesis from the cable company that plugged into the cable jack and let me download games that they offered for a subscription rate of something like $20/month, which was essentially cheaper than renting 4 games/month, and they offered 20 games with about 5 of them getting swapped out every couple of weeks or so, based on how much they got played.
You have a deeply skewed idea of what people can afford.
You're probably right. I grew up in a middle class family and my parents are probably now considered upper-middle class, despite the fact that their disposable income has only grown in relation to the number of kids that have moved out of their house (3 out of 5 unless someone moved back in since I last visited on XMas). I also happen to be considered middle-class myself based on my income, despite the fact that my disposable income is very low, and the area I live in is decidedly below middle class. Of course, since 'low-income' rent in most of the places I've lived generally runs in the $500-800/month area, I guess life just sucks in general (and the idea that someone can qualify to live in low-income housing and pay those rates is frightening).
$130-350 represents the entire monthly disposable income of more than half the families in the US. The "middle class" is a shrinking minority. I assure you, the number of mini-disk players in the backpacks of students in a given highschool varies in direct proportion to where that highschool is.
The highschool I went to was decidedly upper-middle and middle class. The number of pagers and cell phones in backpacks of students was definitely much higher than would have been considered normal in the mid-90's. My youngest step-brother graduated from the same school much more recently and I can't say that he or any of his friends had any more interest in minidisc than anyone else I know, yet most of them (and myself) have portable MP3 players of some sort (I personally have a CD/MP3 player that was amongst the first available, and therefore mostly sucks). The only people I've seen consider minidisc are, as I said before, those looking for something pretty much skip-proof for their cars (which is far more important when you're running rediculous suspension systems on the cars themselves which make even the best CD players skip).
The idea that people are spending money on minidisc players rather than RAM or hard drive based MP3 players seems a bit rediculous to me, especially amongst the middle and upper-middle class. Personally, if I were in a lower income bracket, I think I'd go with cassette, instead, which is what I still use in my car due to the cost of getting a decent CD player for it.
Sony Pictures showed operating income of $492million on sales of $6billion.
Sony Music showed an operating loss of $73million on sales of $5billion.
Sony Videogames showed an operating income of $942million on sales of $8billion.
Sony Electronics showed an operating income of $345million on sales of $41billion.
Sony is doing everything they can to stop IP piracy to protect their movie and entertainment divisions, because that's the best way they have to make money. They have to work a *lot* harder in their electronics division (8 times the sales) to make 2/3 the operating income of the movie division. 5 times more sales in electronics than in videogames, and they made 1/3 the income.
They made nearly twice the income on video games as they did on movies, with movies having 3/4 as much in sales. They lost money in music with more than half as much in sales. As an added bonus, CDs and DVDs are nearly the same in price now, while video games cost 2-3 times as much, whether for a playstation or a PC, and go to 'bargain bin' prices at the same price point as CDs and DVDs.
In other words, they're selling more DVDs than they are video games and making less money because *gasp* no one in their right minds would pay $50 for a movie. At the same time, if you charge half as much for video games (across the board), and for some strange reason sales stay the same (which just wouldn't happen, sales should increase significantly at half price), video games would be at a $3 billion loss.
Chances are that the only reason Sony Pictures shows any kind of profit is because most of the cost of movie production is made up in the theaters, and the blockbusters produce enough to cover the failures (and they produce fewer movies than they do video games or CDs, for the most part, plus their video game profits include profits from games they put out absolutely no money to produce). DVD sales only make money because the cost to produce a DVD is next to nothing, and the movie's production costs are already covered (if they're not, the loss will be written off before the DVD is released, although it will still be counted when it comes to what everyone makes on that movie).
With CDs, they're producing too much crap if they lose 73 million on 5 billion in sales. There's absolutely no way Sony should be spending 5 billion in music production this year if they lost money on 5 billion in sales last year, but I'm guessing that their operating budget was either increased or only decreased by about 100 million (which seems like a lot of money, but if they had 5 billion in sales and lost 73 million, that means they supposedly spent that much more than they brought in). They need to make sure they're getting a significant return on their top artists (ie not spending more in promotions of these artists than they're making), and limit their spending on less known artists. By this, I don't mean they shouldn't sign new artists that no one's heard of, I simply mean that they shouldn't blow $1 million on an album that they should be able to put together in a smaller studio for half that. Sony Music could also cut some of the fat by reducing the number of labels they operate, and still keep the same artists. The only reason so many labels can handle the artists any better than one label could is simply because the people running the labels have no clue how to be flexible about the needs of different types of artists. You don't need a completely new label to address those needs, just a true A&R department that does what those departments were started for in the first place.
Sales don't matter. Income and profits matter
Sales matter a great deal, you get neither income nor profits without sales. Expenditures matter, as well. How much of Sony's efforts against piracy have been taken out of Sony Pictures' profits? How much was taken out of Sony Music? Did Sony Corp. decide to put the overhead all on Sony Music, despite the fact that anti-piracy efforts should really be split between Mu
It's possible that the relatively low incomes that the working and middle classes in USA have, have lead to Minidisc players being too expensive for most people and their kids.
Portable MD players run $130-350. Portable CD/MP3 players from Sony run $90-150. None of these are what seems to be outside the reach of the middle class in the US.
Minidisc never really took off in the US because it had a poor selection of titles at launch and the hardware to record to Minidisc was too expensive initially. Plus, the format came out too soon after adoption of CDs spread. It's had a recent surge from some people looking for alternatives to CDs in car stereos, though.
No one is looking for pre-recorded minidiscs any more, though, which is a good thing since no one carries them anyway.
Region encoding is just bs, and the manufacturers of consoles would have less to complain about in terms of piracy rates if their consoles were region free. Fewer people (though admittedly probably not quite as few as some would like to believe) would be modding their consoles if they could import games and have them just work. Even the GameCube allows region switching without modding it, although it's not as simple as just putting in a game from another region, like the GBA. Unfortunately, the US is still big on region encoding, and it's still pretty hard to find a DVD player that comes region free out of the box, though it's not hard to find little 'easter eggs' that unlock region free operation for most of the current models if you look around on the internet.
Well duh. The bank technically is only giving you an "advance" on that home loan you applied for too. Of course you still have to pay it back. The point is that if you could come up with the money to buy a house yourself you wouldn't have needed their help. Likewise, these artists need money to get nationwide exposure and they're willing to take the label's advances in the hopes that it will launch their career to the point where they're making their own living off it. Repeat after me: the labels are not just going to "give" artists money, they will LOAN it to them.
The post I replied to implied that the labels foot the bills on that. The only time a label foots a bill on anything is if they can't sell your albums, and you'd better bet they don't let you out of their contract even if the fact they can't sell your albums is simply because they didn't promote or even make enough copies of your album. Other than that, if I take a loan out to buy a house, at least I own the house when I'm done with it. If I take a loan from a record label they get to own however many albums I sign for, plus full repayment of every dollar they spend plus interest. I get royalties, which may or may not actually come to me depending on how good my lawyer is (never mind that most artists end up with label-appointed lawyers because they don't realise they need one before it's too late).
Didn't or couldn't? If CC doesn't want to play them, how is the label supposed to "make" them do it?
How did Michael Jackson's videos get on MTV when they refused to play the videos of any black artist in the early/mid 80s? Oh yeah, the label put pressure on MTV by threatening to revoke all of their artists. Pearl Jam may not have been as successful as Michael Jackson with their first two albums, but then Michael Jackson was not as successful as he was without MTV, either.
Yeah, and I imagine these fights are over "I'm not getting AS many millions as I want." Aerosmith, Kiss, Metallica, Eminem, NSync, etc. are millionaires many times over (and I doubt they would have found themselves in that position without the help of a record label, ahem). Forgive me for not caring if they "only" get a few percent of the album sales when those albums are merely ADS for more lucrative ventures. The label takes the risk for fronting money on an album, they deserve to reap the rewards. The artists will either hit it big or return to being unemployed singers. They can only do good signing with a label.
Metallica only got signed because they had already built up a name for themselves, and released 2 albums with a small label. Those 2 albums were included in the number of albums they had to release with the label under their first major label contract, and they retained all of the rights to their music. The biggest 'fight' they ever had with their label was releasing a 3-CD boxed set to fulfill the contract so they could renegotiate after releasing the best selling album they've ever recorded. They weren't exactly worried about money, but they knew they had what it took to get a favourable deal. Who really cares now? They're not even close to the types of problems I was discussing. Try looking for people that filed for bankruptcy after selling millions of records. Some of them were just stupid with their money, but others never made the money in the first place.
As for the albums being ads for more lucrative ventures, that's only the case if you see the industry the way it sees itself. Kiss looked at it that way, Metallica does not. Most bands don't go into music looking to sell T-shirts.
Okay, you're still missing the point. Let's say you're a "talented artist" who's put up a website selling songs at a "Slashdotter-approved" price of two cents per song. How am I going to find your music? I don't hear you on the radio, I don't see you on TV, I don't see articles about you in the newspaper, etc. You have no exposure. Chances are you're still going to be making less money than you would with a major l
You've never used the WaveBird. All problems gone.
OK, I've accepted that the WaveBird may be a good controller. Here's my problem with hearing this repeated over and over again:
WTF good does that do the rest of us that don't currently have a GameCube?
I will most likely pick up a WaveBird with my GC, fine, but as even a few of the people raving about the WaveBird have admitted, that doesn't mean that all wireless controllers are good, or even all current wireless controllers.
Why do you think it's an artist's dream to get a major label deal?
In some cases it is, but in most cases the artist's dream is simply to make a living creating and performing their art. There are many cases where artists have gained a name on independent labels and then had the clout to get major label contracts that worked for them, instead of making them work for the label. In a few cases, those artists were even able to leave the major labels with their work when the labels refused to release and support their work as they intended it to be heard.
Because the label will pay for promotion, advertising, product positioning, radio time, etc.
The label only pays advances for these things. Every bit of it gets charged to the artist, regardless of whether or not the artist approved the methods used (ie paying for radio time, which is illegal if done directly, some artists have had enough clout to force the label to pay for this directly, but it's very rare, and the labels do get billed for every song played every time it's played anyway). Labels will not promote or position artists that they don't want to promote. Regardless of Pearl Jam's musical direction, for instance, they were still getting airplay until they spoke out against Ticketmaster and Clear Channel. Once they did that, Clear Channel shut down their radio play, and the label didn't do anything about it.
These are all things which help you SELL MORE UNITS. If you sell millions, YOU WILL GET PAID. Just ask any artist who has sold millions of records... they'll tell you two things: 1, that they're happy they signed with a major label; 2, that they couldn't have accomplished it by themselves.
For #1: see any number of current and past artists who have had fights with the labels over the amount of money they've made off their multi-platinum albums. Look at the whole thing with Prince (though I'm sure most people could care less about him these days, he was doing very well before he started his fight with Sony), or even the more recent battles with some of the current top-selling acts.
As for #2, the main reason they can't accomplish it by themselves is because of the industry. Radio airplay only goes to the songs that the labels will pay for. Clear Channel (and the one or two other radio promoters in the US) will not put up with stations playing music for which they can't bill a label. Most retail chains won't carry independent music, and few will even carry small labels (and WalMart, the biggest music retailer in the country, has many more rules regarding what they will and will not carry). Viacom owns the majority of all video airplay on television in the US (Viacom owns MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, etc; ever wonder why Nick. started the 'Kids choice awards' and other music promotionals?).
Digital music and video are means by which video and audio recording, production, and distribution can be made easily affordable and accessable to every single person that wants to pursue a career. The labels want to do whatever they can to hold on to their position as the only route through which to gain access to these things, before it becomes easy for my next door neighbor to figure out how to make it without them.
This removes one of the two main reasons people hated it. They're hoping to overcome the other with marketing, I'm sure.
I think you forgot the whole 'throwing plastic discs into the landfills at an alarming rate' part that pissed so many people off.
Also, the simple reality is that some DVD players aren't going to play self-destructing discs. There've been 3 revisions to the DVD standard and there are already problems with old DVD players not being able to play some discs that have no deviation from the standard (just that they hit the 3rd revision standard rather than the original standard).
As an added bonus, the number of DVD and CD players (set-top/stereo component boxes) that are using computer-style CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives has been increasing over the last couple of years (especially the case with DVD players where MP3, MPEG, and other formats are often supported), and in many cases these discs are being made not to run in those types of drives.
As for the DVD Audio format, whether or not it's supported by your DVD player simply depends on what DVD player you own. The older it is, the more likely it is that it's not supported. In those cases where it's not supported you're just as well off buying a player for the new CD format as for the DVD Audio format, and at least the CD format is playable in the majority of CD and DVD players, and the CD-quality tracks on the disc can be ripped to MP3.
I think more people will want to use it to play dvd's than going online or for multiple tv's or want wireless controllers.
I agree with the multiple tvs and wireless controllers parts, but not the going online part. While none of my consoles are currently online (though I'm considering getting a wireless router to hook them all up), I believe that charging extra for an ethernet port (especially at the rates charged for the Sega and Sony adapters, and considering how hard they can be to find) is pretty much insane, especially since it costs next to nothing to add to a system if it's built into the board (consider that you can buy a PCI 10/100 ethernet card for $5, and that ethernet ports are standard on most x86 motherboards now). Cable internet has a very high market penetration in the US, and those that don't have access to it will eventually if they have access to cable television. The more systems that have this built in, instead of as an add-on, the more likely it is that developers will support it. While I believe that online only titles may never take off on consoles, or maybe will simply take a few more years, online multiplayer and online extras will become nearly as crucial in the success of console games as in the success of PC games.
I have my own dvd player and won't ever use a console to play dvd's, but the added cost of being able to play dvd's can't be anything since games already will use that ability to some extent. Its already there so why force someone to buy a remote to access it when it can just as easily be controlled from the controller. If they want something better then buy the remote.
I agree more or less. There could be a few more things that are needed to support DVD playback that aren't needed to play games, but most of that functionality is a very small cost when it's built into the video chipset (as it is with most current video chipsets, both in PCs and consoles). The added cost of the remote is the only reason I've never used my XBox for DVD playback, although I've heard that it does better than the PS2 (I wouldn't use either of them, but my roommate highjacked the DVD player in the living room and I don't care enough to force the issue when I have a DVD player in my room and the PS2 plays DVDs). Still, with the proliferation of DVD players, I'd think the only valid reason for using a game system as a DVD player for most people is when the system is hooked up to a secondary TV in the household. I can certainly pick up a DVD player that does a better job than the PS2 for $10 more than the cost of a PS2 game down at the local WalMart (although quite frankly I doubt that DVD player would be as good as either of the DVD players I already own).
Bill Bixby does NOT make a cameo appearance!
;p
Does this mean that Lou Ferigno (err however that spelling goes) does make an appearance?
Top loading is the best and probably is the best use of space since the top door doesn't need to be very thick or take up much plastic. But with a drawer you have that entire drawer mechanism that you have to build around. Make it look like the rest of my home theater stuff. Right now I have a separate shelf for the game systems because they don't go with anything else that I have and don't fit nicely on the shelves because of their odd sizes and shapes.
Wouldn't a top-loading system continue to cause problems with this for you? At best your console would have to be on top of the stack or on it's own shelf with easy access to the top of the unit. Overall, the current XBox and PS2 don't stand out too much from the rest of the equipment I have, but then the only stuff I have that seems to be a consistent size is rackmount equipment. My Dreamcast, on the other hand, stays out of site when I'm not actively playing it.
If you are going to support dvd playing, make it a progressive dvd player and make it work out of the box. No more nickle and dimeing the customer to buy a remote in order to play dvd's.
So, don't make customers pay for things some don't want/use/need, but make sure the DVD player's a good one and doesn't require anything else to play DVDs... Personally, I don't play DVDs on my XBox because I'm not going to spend $30 to do it, but I wouldn't ask them to build the functionality into it, either. Then again, I don't see why they couldn't control it with the controllers like the PS2 does (even though using the controllers to play DVDs on the PS2 is a pain in the ass).
you're a moron.
I guess I am, since I'm bothering to reply.
have you ever used the wavebird?
I've been told it's pretty good by the other posters in this thread, so I may try it out when I actually get a Gamecube, again as I said in other parts of this thread.
I bet you any amount of money you won't see any kind of latency in a double blind test.
Except, of course, that actually doing a double-blind test is impossible without mocking up a wire on the wireless controller... Or, I could do it blindfolded, in which case I wouldn't know if there was any latency anyway. Then again, considering the games I intend to get for the GC, it may not matter either way.
Also remember the PSOne was released at a low price around the time the Dreamcast came out. So, it could be that near the end of life of one console, if a new console comes out from one of the other 3 (doesn't Nintendo intend to be much faster to the table this time around?), you could see a new revision of the other 2 consoles and a large price drop to combat the adoption of the new console (PS2 came out in the US what, a year after the Dreamcast? Or was that just when you could finally get them without being on a waiting list?). I distinctly remember a lot of parents going out at XMas time looking for 'Playstations' that may have inadvertently brought home PSOne systems for kids that already had a PS 1 and wanted a PS2, because the PS2s were released, but weren't available for the most part.
My parents didn't buy an NES until it dropped to $110 w/ the light gun + duck hunt/SMB cartridge, whereas my uncle had bought one with the robot years earlier for ~$400. The improvement in the graphics of NES games over the years was really amazing when you look back, too.
Also, please don't compare phones with controllers, it is very painful
It's fundamentally the same technology, whether it's painful or not. The only real difference is that the phones usually need more throughput and less interference to be tolerable.
The way I see it, though, is that if people seem to think that a particular controller is much more functional than others have been, then it's not a big deal to go out and grab one when I'm already throwing down some cash for a console, memory card, and other assorted things (gba link cable, maybe another game besides what comes with the console), and would be buying a second controller anyway. Worst case scenario is that it doesn't work well for me, and it gets relegated to the 2nd controller port, much like the XBox S Controller that came with that system.
I would highly recommend both items, although cost might be an issue. If memory serves, the WaveBird was about $35 new, and the Logitech MX700 is around $75 - 80.
;p As for the Logitech mouse, I won't touch anything they make until they make a trackball I can use comfortably. I'm setting up a computer for my gf, though, and she might prefer a mouse, so we shall see. I was considering wireless on that one, anyway, because it was originally going to be used as a media server in my apartment (connected to the TV & stereo, store all of my MP3 files and video files on it), and she only uses the computer for Word/IE for the most part anyway.
I'll probably pick up a WaveBird with my GC in a couple weeks. If it gives me any problems it can always be controller 2
I don't know who the hell ever thought that 6' was enough to go from somewhere near the TV to wherever the kids would be sitting, but they need beaten in the head with something heavy.
It was perfectly fine when I was a kid playing NES and had absolutely no problem sitting on the floor 2 feet from the TV for hours on end. Now I start to get back and circulation problems if I'm not in a comfortable chair, though, and I like to have a place to set a drink, and maybe a strategy guide or some notes depending on the game. Not to mention taking breaks every hour or so to make sure I don't strain my eyes and hands, and to feed my tobacco addiction.
I'd recommend 5ghz. It's got additional bandwidth, and not nearly as many things operating in the same range. Latency shouldn't be an issue, as long as it's tested properly..
5 GHz products are required to meet, at least in the US, 'listen before transmit' specifications. In other words, before transmitting anything (and every time they transmit), they must make sure the frequency over which they're transmitting is clear. The reason is because the frequency range is used by the DoD and military. Since I live in an area surrounded by military bases (Hampton Roads area of Virginia), it's likely that in times of heightened alert a 5GHz device could be either non-functional or high-latency.
I suggest you give it a try, having wireless controller has cleared all the clutter from my living room. You are actually the first person I have ever heard making complaints about latency. Have you even tried out a modern 2.4GHz wireless controller?
Well, I can always pick up a Wavebird when I pick up my GC, and if it works out I'll look around at the controllers for the other systems (unfortunately I somehow doubt there's a recent wireless Dreamcast controller out there). I'm a little worried by the fact that you've never heard any complaints about latency, though, since that would generally imply that either you (and the people you know) don't notice the latency, or just don't play games where it matters (or compensate, which can be done in some games). As for a 2.4 GHz controller, I'm pretty sure both the PS2 controller I tried and the GC controllers my friends have are 2.4GHz, but that doesn't really mean anything, since that's simply the frequency they transmit at, and has little to do with transmission latency. I do know that my parents' 2.4GHz phones sound like crap, but that's really not the same issue, either (has a lot to do with them having transmission towers nearby, which I don't think is an issue where I live, but could be).
I prefer street races to the oval tracks, but I still don't want to watch a bunch of F1/CART style cars any more than I want to watch a bunch of cars turn around an oval all day.